As an enterprise intranet develops constantly and more services run on the enterprise intranet, an access router (AR) serving as a switching device and a switch need to support more services. To support multiple services, the switching device in the conventional art is provided with an open platform board in addition to a main control board. The open platform board can provide diversified distinctive services. According to different service sources, the services may include a service customized by a switching device manufacturer, a third-party cooperative service, a user-developed service, and so on; and according to different service types, the services may include a network traffic analysis service, an antivirus service, and an application acceleration service. The above services additionally integrated into the switching device may be uniformly referred to as the third-party application services. The open platform board, in the form of a board, can conveniently add or remove the software of the third-party application services.
The third-party application services in the conventional art usually require the configuration of the main control board, which is mainly reflected in the form of linkage policy configuration. Taking the antivirus software as an example, when a third-party antivirus software detects that a service flow passing through the main control board carries a virus, the software may need to configure a linkage blocking policy or rule for the main control board, for example, instruct the main control board to block a port or a type of service flow.
To implement the linkage policy configuration of a third-party application service for the main control board, both the main control board and the open platform board on the switching device need to support the protocols used by the third-party application service, mainly including a network management protocol, or a man-machine command format, and so on. Different third-party application service providers may use different protocols, for example, the used network management protocol may be the Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) and Extensible Markup Language (XML).
Therefore, in the conventional art, it is required that the switching device should support multiple protocols. Accordingly, how to configure the switching device to support multiple protocols so as to implement the linkage policy configuration of the third-party application services while taking the configuration cost of hardware and software into account is a problem to be solved in the conventional art.